So I might as well my opinioin on something that everyone else has… A pretty large event in the history of Mac Shareware (is that overstating it?) has just concluded: MacHeist. And there is a lot of press associated with it. So basically it is the whole event was a series of odd, sherlock holmes style mysteries. You would track down some guy who was supposedly a renowned cracker in the Mac community and if you followed the wild goose chase all the way to the end, you got a prize. It was usually a free license to software.
What happened:
So MacHeist was a huge ‘success’ and generated a lot of profit for its organizers. It ended up bringing in around $760,000. Yeah, read that again. $760,000. Assuming that the MacHeist crew payed each developer $5,000 and maybe a little bit more for a few of the products, MacHeist walked away with 760000 – 200000 – 60000 = $500,000. Half a million dollars for being a vehicle and nothing else. There are vehicles in the show business world (agents) and they only make around 10%.
What I think should have happened:
MacHeist should have definitely donated to charity, no doubt about it. I also think that 25% is a very valid amount to donate. So lets give the 25% to charity and 10% for the ‘agents’ for making it happen. Now we have 60% to divvy up amongst the devs. Isn’t that what the MacHeist called “week of the independent developer” is all about? Now we are talking about 6% for each dev. Maybe a little more/less. Now this means that the developers have a stake in the success and they can now make some real money. MacHeist would just have to sell 1700 bundles for the developers to “break even” on the original offer, and they would. They sold 16,000 bundles or so. So now MacHeist would have made a more reasonable $76,000 and the developers could have made something like $45,600 instead of $5,000.
Imagine how hard it is going to be for MacHeist 2 to get developers who know that they are going to sell at least 10,000 bundles. Now imagine how hard it would have been in the second scenario… Sometimes there are more important things than making a boat load of money. Sometimes it is better to build the community and build some loyalty. We could have been having MacHeist 30 in a couple years.
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